Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

by Danilyn Rutherford

For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia. In Laughing at Leviathan, Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself—how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked those that make up an audience. Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state.

 

Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power. Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2012

Reviews

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could give ratings in half-point increments because I was sitting between 3 and 4.

Her primary aim is to unsettle sovereignty. I appreciate her argument that sovereignty is not just a function of the sovereign decision but "audience is sovereignty's basis and its bane"(2). In my own research on the Kurds in Rojava, this rings true. The Autonomous Administration's unrecognition of imposed colonial borders and their own forum shopping for recognition are key factors in their attempts assertion of sovereignty.

For Rutherford, "...sovereignty has always been internally disturbed: unsettled, inconsistent, fraught with contradictions, never quite as supreme as it may seem. The essays in this book relate sovereignty's internal disturbance to its uneasy relationship with audience. Would-be sovereigns depend on acknowledgment from others for their claims to be effective. This means their sovereignty is never equal to itself: sovereignty's spectators exercise a kind of sovereignty themselves." (13)

Methods: I'm a fan of triangulating mixed-methods and Rutherford's use of myth, fiction, short-stories as well as political theory and philosophy were a welcomed move.